I am the former Co-CEO of KP Media, a leading Publisher in Ukraine. In addition to being the leading news organization in Ukraine (Korrespondent, Kyiv Post), we also owned the largest online business, Bigmir.net. I'm now back in the US, consulting and speaking in the areas of Digital Marketing and Digital innovation. You can find my website at www.DigitalTonto.com and follow me on Twitter @DigitalTonto.

6 Things We Need To Do To Compete For The Future

Success used to be simple. You got a good education, found a job with a solid firm, worked hard and saved. Then you raised your kids to to the same. If you did the right things, you weren’t guaranteed riches, but a decent life was nearly a sure thing.

And it’s not just large corporations that are being affected. Machines are replacing humans in fields a varied as medicine, law and even creative fields. Digital technology also allows superstars to be everywhere at once, displacing those who are merely competent. These trends are putting an enormous strain on our society. Here are 6 things we can do about it.

1. Ramp Up Talent

Clearly, as the world’s economy becomes increasingly technologically driven, an educated workforce is absolutely essential. Yet in the latest international PISA tests, which measure not just knowledge but reasoning ability, US students ranked 36th, 28th and 24th respectively in math, science and reading. Not exactly setting the world on fire.

In The Smartest Kids in the World, author Amanda Ripley offers some smart suggestions for how we can improve. First, rather than retroactively trying to improve the quality of teachers, we should raise the standards for getting accredited in the first place. We should also put less emphasis on “tracking,” so that we don’t leave kids behind.

Finally, we need to fix immigration. It simply doesn’t make sense to educate the world’s best and brightest and then kick them out of the country.

2. Invest In Research

A 2008 report by the National Science foundation warned that declining US government support for academic research was a threat to competitiveness. Since then, the situation has worsened because of the sequester and other budget cuts.

It’s difficult to overestimate the role that government funding plays in making the US a technological powerhouse. But to get an idea, just look at the iPhone. Virtually every component—the basic architecture, the microchips, the Internet, GPS and Siri—all benefitted from government funding.

In truth, entrepreneurs function as a “last mile” for innovation. They are great at building applications, user experience and bringing products to market, but are less capable of investing in basic research that makes breakthroughs and creates new paradigms.

If we expect to own the future, we’d better start investing in it now.

3. Revolutionize Energy

Look at just about any problem we have today and you can trace it back to energy somehow—greenhouse gasses, turmoil in the Middle East, Russia’s newfound aggressiveness. In almost every context, it is energy that makes modern life possible and it is the struggle over scarce energy resources that makes the modern world difficult.

At the center of the issue is the fact that historically we have acquired energy by digging it out of the ground. In many ways, geography has determined destiny. However, increasingly we’re learning how to get energy from algorithms rather than from drilling or mining.

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